Flew last week, flu this week!

It seems like yesterday I was back from traveling, but its actually been over a week!

Much of the time has been taken up developing a newsletter to send out to people so that they can read about what we do. I know there's this blog and one of the things I did [well actually a very dear friend, called my wife, did it for me] was to cut down a couple of extracts of the blog as a way of encouraging people to read it!

I went to the launch of a new streaming studio too... they also moved all the control for one of the 24/7 radio stations we had been handling to their own facilities. We will still be handling the streaming to listeners on the internet, on their behalf.In many ways the new studio is actually our success as we planted, watered, nurtured and are now seeing a plant in full bloom so to speak.

When I first suggested the idea of internet radio to them just over three years ago they were not interested. Within a few months they changed that to a cautious first step into internet radio with us developing all the systems needed and running the station 24 hours a day from our own centre here in Cyprus... and it developed and developed till last year when the person in charge admitted that he had been seeing the traditional radio audience decreasing , while the internet audience was rapidly increasing.

Last Autumn they decided to start a regular weekly live broadcast from our studio. The number of people wanting to chat with staff using MSN or Skype was so great, the computer handling them slowed to almost a complete stop.

There's a limit to how much we can achieve alone. Currently we are working beyond that limit. That's why it was so exciting this week to see one of our partners open their own studio for live Internet radio instead of us doing it all.

In between all this we are rebuilding the edit suite... or I should say John is rebuilding it. He has taken out all the old woodwork for the old tube based screens which were build in and created a working surface and panel for the audio meters etc needed. Its nearly complete now. Pete and I were remarking on how with people around helping it really makes a difference to what we can do and we are really really grateful for what John has done.

From Friday I had a terrible cold or a light dose of flu, or something in between. Anyhow I didn't feel great at all. I think I caught it while travelling, or maybe I had been working so hard my body was giving up. Anyhow I wasn't well over the weekend.

Today I was still not 100% so I kind of did a couple of things and put the equipment into the new edit suite. All the audio wiring still has to be done. We need to but a new computer for this [a macpro which will costs between £2500 and £3500 depending on the options we get]. Currently we're using a macmini but this isn't really powerful enough for the purpose, however its vastly more reliable than the old Windows machine was. Two more smaller parts are needed: a Behringer BCF2000 control surface and a Contour ShuttlePro. The last edit suite has lasted 5 or 6 years [with some modifications on the way] so this is the biggest rebuild and hopefully when we have everything will last us another 5-6 years.